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On Cape Cod, Mass., nothing says summer evening as clearly as a big pot of boiling seawater and a mess of locally caught lobsters. Thanks to warming ocean temperatures, the all-important “local” component of that timeless ritual may soon be a thing of the past.

With Cape Cod lobster catches reduced to a quarter of what they were in the 1990s, officials are thinking of imposing a five-year closure of the fishery from the Cape to New York’s Long Island Sound. Continue reading →

Jill Richardson, who is the heart and soul of Lavidalocavore, meets Barbara Kowalcyk, the mom who lost her son to E. Coli (and was interviewed in Food Inc) -mb

There was one part of this week that was intensely emotional for me, and that was meeting Barbara Kowalcyk. If her name rings a bell, that’s because you saw her in Food Inc. She was the mother whose son went from perfectly healthy to dead in the span of a few days due to eating E. coli-tainted beef. When I saw Food Inc. I was newly grieving my brother’s death a few months before. Her story just hit me. When I used to see stories of tragedies like that, it made me sad but not overwhelmingly so. It just wasn’t even something I could comprehend in order to empathize with it. But now, now I get it.

So, while mingling with other attendees of the Consumers Union Activist Summit, I saw an attractive woman in a lime green top standing a few feet away from me. Upstairs, a crowd was watching Food Inc, which I was skipping because a) I’ve seen it twice and b) films give me migraines and Food Inc was worth the two migraines I already got from watching it but not a third one. I thought I had heard that Barbara was coming. And I was pretty sure that this woman in green standing near me was her. Continue reading →

To celebrate Father’s Day, instead of our regular Sunday Supper column we’re offering the hugely popular (and very practical) How to Cook Everything iApp for just $1.99. This way Dad can pick whatever he wants for dinner–and make it too.

One disadvantage of living in Manhattan is trying to take the subway on Sunday. (I’m writing this on a Monday, so the memory is fresh.) Another is the inability to grill. Aside from getting ready for the Mini grill-taping this year, and actually doing it, I haven’t had much opportunity.

So when it was my turn to cook dinner at the reunion I was at last week in Florida, I kind of went nuts. We bought two kinds of sausage and some rib-eye, which I “marinated” with rosemary. Oh, and a few ribs, on which I rubbed some ill-defined spice mixture Daniel Meyer brought back from his Africa trip.

But that was easy, and not especially interesting. Good, but not especially interesting.

Interesting were rediscovering two things I already knew: One, vegetables like to be grilled on low heat. And two, parsley pesto is every bit as good as “real” pesto. Continue reading →

Its name is herb. Tarragon to be exact. And when I saw this announcement of his (or is it her?) second appearance as an object of art, I thought “ugh.”

Talk about fetishizing. How about just eating the stuff? As raising, cooking, eating—and talking about—food becomes more popular, are we actually making it too precious and less approachable? Continue reading →

On Tuesday we cooked zucchini boats and strawberry shortcake for ourselves. On Wednesday we cooked zucchini boats and strawberry shortcake for our parents. On Thursday we cooked zucchini boats and strawberry shortcake for our benefactors. I fear that cooking class may have just had its soft opening.

The repetition was a chance to practice our boat carving and biscuit making, and a welcome opportunity to explain to the kids that cooking is the delicate art of messing something up until it tastes good enough to eat for dinner – or, in this case, good enough to swallow in front of your mother.

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a hundred people gathered at the 6000-square foot Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to talk about the farm’s newest addition: six laying hens.

The farmer, Annie Novak, put together a panel that included Bronx gardener Karen Washington, Owen Taylor from Just Food, and a thirteen year-old chicken enthusiast from Massachusetts named Orren Fox, who has twenty-seven hens and four ducks in Newburyport, 35 miles north of Boston. Last year, he started O’s Eggs, which sells eggs for $5 a dozen. Continue reading →